


The Man Who Fell From Mars

by ErnieThePyle



Category: The Martian (2015), The Martian - All Media Types, The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-30 23:55:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6447226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErnieThePyle/pseuds/ErnieThePyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surviving Mars was only half the story. What will a reporter see when watching Mark Watney readjust to life on Earth?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man Who Fell From Mars

Mark Watney is sore. Every movement is languid; every gesture has a hint of a grimace. The famed astronaut is clearly struggling with his physical therapy routine but every single time the trainer asks if he would like to take a break, without exception or hesitation, Watney waves her off. Sometimes, the dismissal is more colorful than others.

“If Mars can’t kill me, a few sit-ups sure as fuck can’t,” Watney says in-between reps, his feet trapped under physical therapist Andrea Cresick’s hands. 

Watney is lying flat on his back on the faded-blue mat, his arms crossed over his sweat-soaked chest. He breathes for a moment before jerking up again for another sit-up. 

Watney is 15 minutes in to one of his first full-fledged physical therapy sessions since arriving back on Earth three months ago. He’s been out of the hospital for just a few weeks of that time but already he’s thrown himself into regaining the 45 pounds that he’s still short. 

Watney managed to regain 35 pounds while en route home from the months he spent on the Red Planet, alone and subject to an extraordinarily restrictive diet put in place by well-meaning NASA dieticians. They did, after all, have to keep him alive without resupply for nearly two years, in a habitat originally designed to last just a month, and stocked with a limited amount of potatoes. And almost nothing else.

Fries still scare him, Watney told me in an interview. He doubts he’ll ever have an actual potato ever again. But gravity? That’s something he can’t get enough of. And something that still can’t get enough of Watney’s slender frame. 

“Ready for more?” Cresick asks after Watney’s managed to squeeze out sit-up number 30. 

Watney lies there, breathing hard, only for a moment before spurting out a reply.

“Fuck yes,” he says. 

“Pushups then.”

Watney shifts back and forth to work up some momentum and turn over from lying on his back. He grunts slightly with the effort, but now he’s on his stomach, hands planting themselves into the mat as he works his arms. 

Watney grunts again.

“One,” Cresick calls out as Watney’s arms lock. He breathes for a second before dropping down nearly to the floor, only to push back up again in jerking half-movements. 

“Two,” Cresick says. 

Sweat drips off Watney’s nose. He shakes his head slightly to throw off the moisture before dipping back down, but his arms give out on the bend and he hits the mat with a dull thud. 

“You don’t have to do the 10,” Cresick tells him.

Watney’s reply is muffled, effort clear in his voice. But the attitude a billion people have come to know so well is no less distinct. 

“I used to be able to do 100 of these fucking things,” he says with his face still pressed into the mat. “I can do seven fucking more.”

Cresick pauses before answering.

“Actually, that didn’t count. You owe me eight.”

Watney grunts in reply. But he heaves and his chest clears the ground slowly, only to rise until his arms have all but locked out. 

“Three,” Cresick says.

The man who’s come to be called The Martian hits the mat twice more before he manages all 10 pushups. But he does them like he does everything else. 

Every few minutes I think I catch Watney stealing glances in the mirror on the far wall. He’s still getting used to the view, he says in an interview, still frustrated with the massive physical toll that Mars took on him. 

This is in fact Watney’s first in-depth interview since his rescue. He gave statements, of course, and was trotted out for the cameras as much as he could stand, but the glimpses of gaunt frame and still-shrunken eyes has kept him as far away from a camera as he could get. That was one of the few stipulations for this story, that there be no photographic documentation of his struggles, just my words and his sweat. 

Right now his sweat is about to come from the lat-pulldown machine. Watney sits down and raises his arms to the bar, ignoring Cresick’s warning that he should probably start with a lighter weight. 

Watney pulls. The bar doesn’t budge. Cresick takes a step forward but Watney merely glowers at her before he sucks in a sharp breath and pulls again, yanking the bar downward towards his chest. It comes in two sputtering jerks. On the return Watney is clearly struggling to maintain his grip and the weights crash down with a metallic clang. 

“Maybe that is a little too heavy,” Watney says in between gulps of air. He makes no move to stop Cresick as she steps forward to pull out the pin and find a more suitable weight for the astronaut and trained botanist. 

Watney weighed in at 185 lbs. before setting off for Mars. NASA records show a man in his physical prime a week before takeoff, clocking his mile time at an impressive 6:22 and his body fat ratio an athletic 15 percent. Then, a week into his time on the Red Planet with five other crewmembers, what Watney calls “The Cluster” happened, although usually the description doesn’t end on “-er.” 

A massive storm with the force of several Earth hurricanes slammed into the Mars site and Mission Commander Melissa Lewis ordered an emergency evacuation. The crew had to hurry out in the open storm to get to the evacuation ship, but a piece of equipment was swept up in the wind and slammed into Watney, puncturing his side and knocking him unconscious even as it disabled the device that read his life signs. Commander Lewis tried to look for Watney but with the storm raging and the winds threatening to knock over the evacuation ship—stranding all five astronauts she knew to still be alive—she had no choice but to presume Watney dead. So they left. 

Watney woke up hours later, the most alone a person has ever been in human history. The nearest man, woman or child was by then tens of thousands of miles away as the rest of his crew sped back to Earth. 

Watney would end up spending some 550 Martian days on the Red Planet, or about 564 Earth days. His first challenge was to grow potatoes on a barren rock, enough to eat when his rations inevitably ran out long before the next scheduled touchdown on Mars. That meant creating water and it meant farming, what the botanist describes conversely as the most cathartic but also one of the most frustrating of his tasks. At the same time, he had to plot out how he would return home. 

Eventually Watney made contact with NASA after jury-rigging an old exploration crawler, called Pathfinder, and was rescued by his old crew—who’d staged their own small mutiny to turn around against orders and return to Mars—but not before an explosion rendered his potato crops useless. And so he made do with food enough that should have only lasted a fraction of the time he spent.

By the time Watney was weighed for the first time on the ship home, he was put at 105 Earth pounds. Watney was by then frail and sickly, exhausted beyond measure and suffering from severe malnutrition. Sores covered most of his body and he’d lost virtually all muscle tone.

Once aboard ship, Watney was sedated for three days while an IV was attached to try and restore some of the nutrients his body had subsisted without. He had his first real meal five days after arriving on the ship: freeze-dried apples and steak, with nary a potato in sight. 

The 4 oz. steak, Watney told me, “tasted like shit. But it was the best fucking shit I’ve ever had.” Watney ate as ravenously as he was allowed, but those same calorie-counting dieticians and doctors worried about bursting a stomach that had shrunk by half what it should have been. And so Watney took it slow, eating progressively more and eventually he was allowed to start using the ship’s treadmill to regain some strength. But only to walk. 

Truly strenuous exercise was forbidden, at least until a far more thorough physical examination than could be done in space was performed back on Earth. In the meantime, Watney had to make do with a diet he’s still convinced was far too cautious. But he complied nonetheless. 

In the training room, with now normal, un-simulated Earth gravity, Watney’s tolerance for compliance is not what it was, and even he admits his manners deteriorated after nearly two years without so much as hearing another human voice. 

“Fuck off,” Watney tells Cresick—only to immediately and profusely apologize, more expletives included—when she asks him if he’s up for more. “I can do it. Really,” he finally says. 

Cresick sighs and directs Watney to a kind of rotary dial that users spin around with their arms to improve grip and forearm strength. Watney begrudgingly allows Cresick to set the machine to the lowest possible resistance. He begins spinning. 

“The weird part is how much I think I enjoyed isolation,” Watney says as his arms work the machine. I think he’s talking to me but he might as well be talking to the air around him, or to the recording gear he claims to have so meticulously transcribed his thoughts to while on Mars. “The shit you can do when no one is watching is, well, a lot,” he adds. 

I’ve noticed. Everything you only ever do in private, the things you’d never let another adult human being see you do? Watney does pretty much every one of them during the training session. Sentences spill out half-formed. Scratches are indulged. 

In-between exercises I try to ply Watney with questions of his time on Mars. He speaks of running out of music and things to read. Of how elastic he felt under Martian gravity less than two-fifths of that on Earth. 

“Real-Earth gravity hit me like a truck,” Watney tells me as Cresick steers him towards a leg press machine. He complains only a little when Cresick puts just 40 pounds on the machine but he complies, only to grunt through the effort. 

After three rounds of leg press Watney rises unsteadily, his legs wobbling from the strain. He looks down at his sweat-soaked chest, a mixture of frustration and exhaustion on his face. 

“I feel sorry for whoever has to wipe this place down,” Watney says. He’s not allowed anywhere near a normal fitness center. This in fact is a special NASA facility, one cleaned thoroughly as Watney’s battered immune system slowly remembers what it’s like to be around Earth-bacteria again. He’s already gotten mildly sick once since returning planet-side, another item on the list of side-effects—like severely deteriorated bone metabolism—that Watney says scientists have been eager to study. 

The Martian stresses how little interest he has in becoming a test gerbil even as he steps onto the treadmill. “Maximum velocity,” he jokes, only for Cresick to put the machine at a light jog. Watney struggles to keep up, his breath wheezing. But he refuses any offer to slow the machine. 

The sound of a door opening draws our attention to the far wall. In walks Theodore “Teddy” Sanders, the head of NASA. As a courtesy, I’ve been asked to specifically point out Sanders’s title: he’s grown frustrated of being repeatedly called the director of the space agency when in fact his actual title is administrator. 

“Come to see the gerbil?” Watney pants out. 

Sanders more or less ignores Watney and instead turns to Cresick. “How’s he doing?” Sanders asks. 

Aside from Watney himself, Sanders’s is the face that has become most synonymous with the Mars stranding. He’s appeared on television nearly 400 times since news broke first of Watney’s apparent death—dispelled when a satellite picked up rather human activity near the Mars mission site weeks later. The satellite was in fact the only means of observing Watney until he modified Pathfinder, with all the long-range communications gear already speeding back to Earth. 

Cresick shrugs at the question. “He’s a trooper,” she says, ignoring a loud retort from Watney. “A long way to go but he’ll get his strength back.” 

Sanders nods and turns to Watney. I’m reminded of the look on his face when he announced to the world that NASA was wrong, that the first human being killed on Mars was actually the first to be stranded there. Speculation has run rampant that Sanders would resign or even be forced out but so far he’s stayed at his post and remains, in Congressional testimony and public appearances, to be a staunch advocate for the most expensive scientific research project in U.S. history. 

Watney has become poster boy A through Z for that project, and in interviews the Martian admits he’s been pressured extensively to become a more public face. 

“Has the press bitten you yet?” Sanders asks as Watney’s legs pump away at the treadmill. The administrator knows I’m here of course, he was in fact a major facilitator of this interview and sat down for one himself. But it doesn’t seem that I’m the one who really needs convincing. 

Watney sucks in a breath, and then another, before replying. “It’s not the press,” he says. “It’s the cameras.”

Sanders nods. “I get that, I do. But we need you out there. And you’re already looking a lot stronger.”

“I know,” Watney replies. A sweaty hand gestures towards me. “Isn’t he a good start?” The Martian asks. 

Sanders turns his head towards me only a little before answering. “This interview is. But a diatribe about your journey back to health isn’t going to inspire any future astronauts.”

“What about 4Fs?” Watney retorts, referring to the designation granted during World War II to men deemed too frail and sickly to fight. “Set this to a Rocky theme and I’m a mean role-model.” 

Cresick snorts a little in a mild laugh and I think I catch a glimpse of a half-smile on Sanders’ normally serious face. 

“You want to do a boxing montage? Fine. But that means cameras,” Sanders says. 

Watney’s face flashes and I think he realizes he just walked himself into a trap. He’d later tell me that he always knew he’d have to face the cameras, much as he didn’t want to. He just wanted to look more like his old self and less like a half version.

“Give me 10 more pounds,” Watney finally says in a strained breath over the din of his footfalls on the treadmill. “Then cameras.”

Sanders doesn’t reply for a moment but I can tell he’s thinking. He turns again to Cresick. “How long would that take?” he asks her. 

Cresick shrugs. “Couple weeks probably.”

Sanders looks still more thoughtful as he mulls the timeframe, then turns back to the figure pumping away on the treadmill. “I need you in front of Congress in three weeks for our budget hearing. Can you do that?” 

NASA’s proposed budget is looking for an extra $25 billion over last year, most of that for further Mars missions and trips well outside Earth’s general neighborhood in the Solar System, both manned and unmanned. 

While Congress was supportive of the billions spent saving Watney—itself a controversial subject—much of that goodwill has burned away since The Martian’s return. There’s been talk of a slash to NASA’s funding, perhaps cutting the space agency’s future planned missions to the Red Planet by half. Watney, Sanders told me in an interview, is key to reverting that talk. 

In the training room, nothing but the sound of elastic footfalls fills the room as Watney jogs. He’s well-aware of NASA’s budget, he tells me separately, and wants to help ensure the biggest story the space agency tells isn’t his stranding. Finally he nods to Sanders. “I’ll be there.” 

“Good,” Sanders replies. “You’ll do great,” he adds after a few more footfalls. 

“I hope so,” Watney says. “Any advice?”

Sanders smiles fully for the first time since he entered. “Maybe a little less swearing,” he says. 

Sanders stays to watch Watney for another minute more, making small talk with the Martian and Cresick, before bidding adieu and turning around to head out the door. 

 

Watney himself has another five minutes to hit the goal of 20 on the treadmill. The machine beeps when he does and Cresick reaches over and hits a button to begin Watney’s final slowdown. He protests only a little about being able to do more but Cresick insists that he’s had enough. 

The machine stops and Watney steps off gingerly. He wipes himself down with a towel while Cresick reminds him of the post-training routine and the basic exercises he can do on his own.

“And don’t break yourself between now and Friday,” Cresick adds as Watney heads towards the door and the showers beyond. 

Watney treats her to a smile over his shoulder. “Don’t worry, I can fix anything,” he replies.

I follow behind as Watney makes his way to the door. He reaches out to grab the off-white handle while telling me about the doors in space and on Mars. 

“I still think I need to go through a pressurization sequence with every Earth door I come across,” he says as the door opens and he steps through. 

The door closes sharply behind us and Watney jumps a little. “Still getting used to all the extra noise that’s not Martian hurricanes,” he tells me. 

In the showers I stand just around the corner as Watney complains about how far his body has come and how far it still has to go. About how he got the slightest sunburn the first time he set foot outdoors on Earth with nary a spacesuit in sight. 

I ask Watney what the hardest part of being around people is again.

“Tactile contact,” he replies in between suds. “Everyone wants to shake my hand. And I thought my dad was going to break my spine when he hugged me.” 

Watney is silent for a moment before he speaks again. “That and people talking back when you say something. Not just talking to myself and the recording gear anymore.” 

Our time is nearly up as Watney dresses in brand-new, extra skinny clothes he bought with as much stretch as he could find. 

He figures he’ll have to go through at least two more complete wardrobes before he can wear the clothing he left behind. For now though, Watney has some catching up to do. He’s on the way to a mall, where he’s still trying to assimilate himself back to humanity. And then a movie theater, trying to catch up, as he says, on sitting around doing nothing, instead of the constant motion and constant struggle that is life on Mars.

On the way out the door Watney fumbles for his phone. He wants to call his mom, he says. She insists he keep her updated on his recovery. 

Watney’s tone changes as he walks away and I can tell someone has picked up on the other end of the line. “Come in,” Watney says, “can you hear me, space command?”

**Author's Note:**

> For those hardcore news nerds out there, yes, the first line is a direct allusion to the famous "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" news article.


End file.
